The mounting and adjustment of a drawer in a cabinet or other item of furniture has typically been a time-consuming process. Drawers are usually mounted in cabinets using a centrally located drawer guide extending from the drawer opening in the front of the cabinet to a mounting surface at the rear of the cabinet. Into the mounted drawer guide fits a sliding member attached to the drawer itself. One of the most common types of drawer guide is referred to as the center-guide type drawer guide. In this type of drawer guide, a single guide is positioned longitudinally beneath the center of the drawer and orients and aligns the drawer as it is slid in and out of the cabinet.
The center-guide type of drawer guide is typically mounted in a cabinet by first securing to the cabinet the end of the guide closest to the drawer opening. The rear of the guide is then mounted, by means of a bracket, to the rear wall of the cabinet. The mounting bracket most commonly used has horizontal and vertical screw slots to adjust the position of the bracket once mounted on the cabinet. With this bracket, the screws used with the slots have to be alternately inserted and removed in the vertical and horizontal slots as the bracket is adjusted to square the drawer front with the opening in the cabinet face. Additionally, the horizontal and vertical adjustments provided by the slots are relatively small. The critical adjustment with a drawer guide is in the horizontal direction, as it is this adjustment which prevents the drawer from binding in the cabinet. The vertical adjustment is not as critical as it only determines the angle of the drawer relative to the cabinet and does not usually affect the binding. Because of the limited adjustment, if the initial placement of the bracket is too far out of line, the bracket may have to be completely removed and repositioned. Therefore, the adjustment of a drawer guide mounted with this type of bracket consumes much time and labor and needlessly slows down the construction of the cabinet. Furthermore, these brackets often have to be readjusted when the cabinets are transported or jarred, because such actions can cause the drawer to become out of square with the cabinet face. This readjustment requires repetition of the inefficient process described above.
A further problem with this type of bracket is that the drawer guide mounts rigidly in one location on the bracket. Consequently, small production variations in the length of the guide or the depth of the cabinet require special fitting of the mounting bracket to the drawer guide and to the cabinet. These special adjustments further exacerbate the problems caused by the basic inefficiency of the mounting bracket itself.
A final problem with the mounting brackets found in the prior art are that the vast majority of them are designed to be mounted by screws or nails to the cabinets. The installation of the drawer guides in cabinets can be accomplished much more quickly if the mounting brackets are designed so that they can be stapled into the furniture cabinet.
Accordingly, it is the principal object of this invention to provide for the rapid adjustment of a drawer guide mounted in a furniture-type cabinet without the necessity of moving the location of the mounting bracket once it is secured to the cabinet.
It is a further object of this invention to eliminate special fitting of the drawer guide to the mounting bracket and of the bracket to the cabinet when production variations occur in the depth of the cabinet or the length of the drawer slide.
It is a final object of this invention to allow adjustable drawer guide mounting brackets to be quickly affixed, by staples or similar devices, to furniture cabinets.